South Sea, Artificial Continent, Mu
Locked up in the 12th dock, the members of the adventure fleet were observing the battle between Baldr and New Yamato.
They hoped that Baldr would win, but more than that, they prayed that Riella would be unharmed.
Though she was young, they all looked up to her as their leader.
On account of this, seeing Baldr explode, burn, and sink, followed by Shu using Riella as bait, might have made some of them faint.
However, that didn’t happen.
Shortly before New Yamato fired the second shot, the monitor that displayed the battle became a muddy white and stopped showing anything.
“What is this?”
“Broken? At a time like this...?!” They all complained, but the monitor remained unchanged.
One of them was a High Mechanic and used a skill to see what was wrong, but it appeared undamaged.
“Wait, how was the monitor able to display their battle, anyway?”
“This is just something I heard, but apparently, Mu has lots of information gathering equipment, including long-distance cameras that can film even beyond the horizon.”
They all agreed that this was probably an issue with the cameras.
That left them with no options. They couldn’t leave the dock, so they couldn’t exactly go out and fix them.
All they could do was pray Baldr won and Riella emerged unharmed.
As they fretted about that...
“Khe... Kha kha... Khe... Kha kha...”
...a bizarre sound came from the other side of the clouded monitor.
“No good. Even the sound is glitching now.”
“Oh yeah, Vice Captain. There’s still the opening used by the fleet commander and the bear fellow. Why not go through, check the cameras, and... Vice Captain?”
The fleet’s High Mechanic spoke to Asam, but the man was completely nonresponsive.
He seemed to be completely spaced out, doing nothing but stare at the pale monitor making the eerie noise.
“No... No!”
“Vice Captain?!”
His face all pale, Asam grabbed the bridge’s comms device.
“Commander! Mr. Starling! Can you hear me?!” It was a call toward the boat used by Riella and Shu, now stored inside Baldr.
However, Baldr was currently on the seafloor pretending to have sunk, and the comms could not reach it.
“Ngh! Use the speaker! Demand that the bulkhead be opened! Load all weapons! Worse comes to worst, we’ll break this dock and escape through brute force!”
“Vice-Captain! What’s going on?!” The change in Asam’s behavior made the crew wonder what had gotten into him.
“...That voice.” His expression full of terror, he named the very important reason he was behaving this way.
“Voice?”
“That’s its voice...!”
As if to emphasize Asam’s words...
“Khe... Kha kha... Khe kha kha kha!”
...the sound from earlier rang out again—that voice like screeching metal.
“Vice-Captain... You don’t mean...!”
“I’ve heard it before. I could never forget it...!”
It haunted Asam like a nightmare.
He’d taken part in the battle that destroyed the adventure fleet, and this detestable sound had been seared into his mind.
“That’s its voice! It’s here!”
A moment after Asam’s shout, Mu began to shake with great intensity.